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Spirit..bound for Alaska

Sail Date:
April 2012

Destination:
Alaska

Embarkation:
Seattle

This was mine and my husbands' third cruise with Carnival and only Carnival. It started off bad when we called Carnival several times to make sure we did not need a passport..we were told No every time but they failed to mention that we would need a passport for most excursions. So we were left with excursions we weren't interested in.

The Carnival employees at the Seattle airport and the bus driver were friendly. We got to our room & wanted to make lunch with not much time but we wanted to leave our expensive belongings in the safe. Fifteen minutes later we give up and lug all our stuff to the lunch buffet but beforehand we pass by our room steward & he said he'd fixed it..the culprit was a bad battery. That thing I will mention woke us up at random times at night going off.

Because my husband is in the military doesn't get a lot of time to designate to when he takes a vacation we didn't plan this vacation but a week in advance which meant getting the second to last More
room available. My biggest problem with this cruise was that we paid a lot to have the balcony (which was all that was available) and we hardly ever got to use it because nine times out of ten we had to smell cigarette smoke. I am allergic to cigarette smoke and I find it a disgusting smell. So the balcony was a waste of $650 extra money spent.

During this seven day cruise all we saw was one humpback whale (this was a treat), a few bald eagles and two bears, one far away from the ship and one in a port. We were expecting to see a lot of different animals and I'm afraid I would have fared better going to the mountains an hour away from where I live. It was overcast the first three days and overcast here and there with the rest of the cruise. Again, I think that the time we went on the cruise wouldn't have been my choice. It was pretty cold as well.

The food? I am quite the adventurous eater in that I like to try odd and new things but doing so every day got to be too much. One thing that was ridiculous is that for breakfast and lunch we had a hard time finding a place to eat because people were either occupying tables to sightsee or play cards. So we ate either in the lido smoking section or in our room. I think Carnival should mention daily for passengers to be polite and courteous of other diners. Simple concept. One particular busy lunch my husband and I and a few others were standing to the side to let some other diners go by and all of a sudden I am whacked by a door..so hard I lost my balance. I was told by the Carnival employee to not stand there because of the door. I felt she was unprofessional to not apologize..not to mention there are portholes so she might want to look out the window. Had it been a child or a small adult they would have been harmed.

Our room was cleaned up of dishes sporadically. One cup of juice sat in our room for three days, of course we could have emptied it but we left it there as it was a running joke. The last night our bed was not made, the dishes taken away because our room steward was too busy helping with other passengers taking the luggage down..I'm assuming.

Between the cigarette smoke on our balcony (and it seemed to waft outside our room door the whole time) and Carnival seeming to only care about the almighty dollar we will not be cruising on a Carnival ship again. Less